GnomePropertyBox

Gnome User Interface Library Reference Manual
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Object Hierarchy

  GtkObject
   +----GtkWidget
         +----GtkContainer
               +----GtkBin
                     +----GtkWindow
                           +----GnomeDialog
                                 +----GnomePropertyBox

Description

The GnomePropertyBox widget simplifies coding a consistent dialog box for configuring properties of any kind.

The GnomePropertyBox is a toplevel widget (it will create its own window), inside it contains a GtkNotebook which is used to hold the various property pages.

The box will include ok, cancel, apply and help buttons (the actual buttons depends on the settings the user has, for example, apply can be hidden). The ok and apply buttons will start up in non-sensitive state, the programmer needs to configure the widgets inserted into the property box to inform the widget of any state changes to enable the ok and apply buttons. This is done by calling the gnome_property_box_changed() function.

To use this widget, you create the widget using gnome_property_box_new() and then you call gnome_property_box_append_page() for each property page you want in the property box.

The widget emits two signals: "apply" and "help". To make a functional dialog box you will want to connect to at least the "apply" signal. Your function will be invoked once for each page and one more time at the end, passing a special value of -1 for the page number.

Here is a sample callback routine layout

Example 1. Sample callback for the "apply" signal

void
dialog_apply_callback (GnomePropertyBox *property_box, gint page_num)
{
        switch (page_num){
	case 0:
	        apply_changes_page_0 (property_box);
		break;
	case 1:
	        apply_changes_page_1 (property_box);
		break;
	default:
	}
}

Some people just check for the last condition like this:

Example 2. Sample callback for the "apply" signal

void
dialog_apply_callback (GnomePropertyBox *property_box, gint page_num)
{
        if (page_num != -1)
                return;

        apply_all_changes (property_box);
}

A fully finished program should also hook up to the "help" signal to provide context sensitive help in the dialog box. This signal also receives the page number in which the help is invoked, so you can provide different help nodes for each page if you desire to do so.

The GNOME libraries include a number of helper routines that will help you provide help in your application. Here is a sample piece of code:

Example 3. Sample callback for the "help" signal

void
dialog_help_callback (GnomePropertyBox *property_box, gint page_num)
{
        GnomeHelpMenuEntry help_entry_page_0 = { "application-id", "page-0-help" };
	GnomeHelpMenuEntry help_entry_page_1 = { "application-id", "page-1-help" };

	switch (page_num){
	case 0:
	       gnome_help_display (0, help_entry_page_0);
	       break;

	case 1:
	       gnome_help_display (0, help_entry_page_1);
	       break;
        }
}

The value "0" in the example above is ignored by the gnome_help_display routines. This is done so that you can use a hack to connect to help in simpler situations without having to provide a full callback (like in this example).

You can actually save some time if you use the gnome_help_pbox_display() routine. This routine is designed to work side-by-side with the GnomePropertyBox object. It works like this:

Example 4. Connecting the "help" signal using the gnome_help_pbox_display() routine

void
property_dialog_do_connections (GnomePropertyBox *property_box)
{
        static GnomeHelpMenuEntry help_entry = { "application-id", "base-name" };

	gtk_signal_connect (GTK_OBJECT (property_box), "help",
	                    GTK_SIGNAL_FUNC(gnome_help_pbox_display), &help_entry);
}

This will use the "base-name" as a template to create the fully-qualified name of the help file using the page number as part of the filename component (the result is in the form "base-name-$pagenum.html", where $pagenum is substituted with the page number).

See the documentation for gnome_help_pbox_display() for more information

Details

struct GnomePropertyBox

struct GnomePropertyBox;